In a number of textile manufacturing operations, continuous textile material is produced having thickened individual portions woven therein in series longitudinally of the material and which are separated by thinned portions extending transversely across the material. This is particularly true in textile manufacturing operations for producing terry towels in which the thickened portions are individual terry towels and the thinner portions are nonterry.
In the fabrication of individual articles, such as terry towels, from such woven textile material, the individual articles must be cut apart along the transversely-extending thinner portions and an equal amount of such thinner portion should remain on each cut edge of the cut-apart article for subsequent hemming or the like finishing operation along such cut edge.
Heretofore, these fabricating operations have been performed, for the most part, manually by an operator utilizing a cutting mechanism, since the cutting mechanism had to be visually guided along generally the center of the thinner separating portions of the material or the material had to be aligned relative to a stationary cutting mechanism to provide generally equal amounts of the thinner portion on each cut edge after the cutting operation for the subsequent hemming or other finishing operation. These manual operations were not entirely satisfactory inasmuch as they often resulted in unequal and consistent amounts of the thinner portion remaining on each cut edge. Also, these manual operations were time consuming, labor absorbing and expensive.
While some automatic and semi-automatic machines have been proposed which attempted to align and position the thinner separating portion of the material relative to a cutting device so that the cutting device would cut the articles apart generally through the center of the thinner separating portion of the material, these semi-automatic or automatic machines have not been commercially successful for many reasons including the inability to properly align and position such thinner separating portions of the material relative to the cutting device.